“This isn’t about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. said. He said the incident made him realize how vulnerable poor people and minorities are “to capricious forces like a rogue policeman, and this man clearly was a rogue policeman.”
It’s thinking like this that makes me sort of happy I chose to skip college after high school and instead jumped right into pursuing my dream. I started with nothing and worked my way up and because I’ve always lived and worked in the real world I know better than to accept this line of thinking and I’m certain a majority of Americans do too.
Mr. Gates, it doesn’t matter if you’re poor, black, or any other minority — a rouge policeman is a rogue policeman no matter what and you’ll find them in every city in America. Heck, Hollywood likes to glorify rogue policeman in popular entertainment, but that’s another post all together.
Sgt. James Crowley is clearly not a rogue policeman. In fact, he’s just the opposite. He’s the real deal and we all know it, as does the President … now.
Let me tell you a story about when I was harassed and nearly arrested by a police officer in Jersey City, NJ back in 08. My wife (7 months pregnant at the time) and I lived in a loft in the downtown warehouse district and had to loop around a couple of city blocks to find parking. We found a spot and were slowing to a stop when, seemingly out of nowhere, gut-sinking flashing lights appear behind us and one very angry (Chinese) officer approaches our car. My wife was driving, and he knocks on her window (she’s Filipino) and shouts at her, “Why the hell didn’t you stop when I was signaling for you to pull over!” Mind you this wasn’t a pleasant question. When she attempted to tell him that we had just turned the corner from around the block and never saw him he went batty on us.
He was absolutely positive we were lying and threatened to bring us down to the station where he would make it “difficult for us,” whatever that meant, if we didn’t admit to what he thought we had done. When I attempted to ask a question he made me get out of the car and searched me. He was extremely tense and the whole ordeal went down on a back street where we were all alone. Though he had absolutely zero reason to hold us any longer after a long license plate search, he continued to threaten us for God knows what until he simply ended the harassment and drove away. Shaken and confused, we parked and went inside.
For the rest of the time I lived in the “artist district” (basically a rough neighborhood in renovation) I carried around a small camera for fear the police might harass me again for no reason.
Wait! I just realized why he harassed me in the first place. It must be because I AM WHITE! He hates WHITEY.
Nah…
Only a complete fool would think that way.